I’m driving at 100mph down the freeway with the rotting head of Walt Disney mounted to the front of my Hyundai Sonata. Inside the car I am listening to Beethoven, shouting out every note; G sharp, C sharp, E, G sharp, C sharp, E, and so on. It was a hot day and the AC was turned up. I laugh to myself. The idea that you could beat global warming by turning on
“a machine that made air cold was preposterous.” I said. I realised I was talking to myself. Past me went industry, trees, signs, road sides, cars, trucks, under bridges and through towns, through cities. I was aimless. The flatness of Kansas seemed claustrophobic somehow, as if the horizon around you seemed close enough to reach out and touch.
I stop for fuel; gasoline, burgers, cigarettes. I find myself at registers ranting at the cashier about my journey. People tap me on the shoulder and I freak out. I sit in the car in the rain, pulled up in the breakdown lane with the hazards on, holding a Clipper beneath tinfoil holding white powder, sucking up the smoke through a glass straw held between cracked lips. As I drive down the interstate, I think I see a passenger in my peripheral, jump in fear, shouting to myself. I am alone. The head of Walt Disney is becoming a skull, the wind stripping away the meat as the river kneads a stone. On the rearview hung twenty-nine Christmas Tree air-fresheners, though I began to associate the smell of the perfume with the underlying stench of the car that had held a rotting head and drug smoke for the best part of a month. I took it in for a service just outside Salina. Full clean, wax, oil change, check the spark plugs, all that stuff. I look at a map of Kansas pinned to a corkboard in the garage.
“Where you headed?” says a mechanic, wiping oil onto his hands from a special cloth.
“I was thinking of heading West, toward Colorado, toward Vegas. But I don’t know if I want to head straight to L.A. yet.” I say, lighting a cigarette.
“What’s waiting for you?”
“The end.”
“You in a rush?”
“I think I’ve got time. There’s still a lot I want to do.” I say. We both turn to an engineer using an electric sander on a car, a spray of sparks fly upward behind him, reminding me of Icarus.
“Well, what's stopping you, partner?” says the mechanic.
“Nobody has forever.” I say. We watch the sparks flying up toward the ceiling, fading before they get there. As I leave the mechanic calls after me.
"Bud, you left your chocolate bar!"
"Keep it." I say, throwing a gesture with my fingers. The mechanic grabs the chocolate bar, thinking its from Dubai. Its actually the superior $1 Mexican chocolate.
I'm driving through farms in the night time, take a wrong turn, ride along a fading tractor track leading up to an abandoned farm. A waning moon dips low behind a farmhouse that once was. I park up, climb through a window, sit against a rotten wall, look out at the night sky shining with stars. Check my pockets. A bubblegum vape, a bag of 2c-b, a pair of nailclippers and a half eaten burger wrapped in greasy paper. I eat the burger and hit the vape, eventually I fall asleep and dream of strange rooms.
